May 2016
Forty miles
Pieced by gannet
The saint who never was
Keening through skirts of sleet
Her broken psalm
Against time
Forty miles
To jaws of gabbro , dark Hirta
Boreray, Stac Li. Towering teeth
Bird-crammed. Men spidered, scaled
Over a void where one fall
Could blacken time
Forty miles
The wheel spun, warping language
The world weaved on
Behind oiled womens fingers
Picking at time
Forty miles
Over sheened cobbles to the bay
Men and dogs taken last
Out of a mornings haar
To stranger seas in time
Pieced by gannet
The saint who never was
Keening through skirts of sleet
Her broken psalm
Against time
Forty miles
To jaws of gabbro , dark Hirta
Boreray, Stac Li. Towering teeth
Bird-crammed. Men spidered, scaled
Over a void where one fall
Could blacken time
Forty miles
The wheel spun, warping language
The world weaved on
Behind oiled womens fingers
Picking at time
Forty miles
Over sheened cobbles to the bay
Men and dogs taken last
Out of a mornings haar
To stranger seas in time
A lament following the death of the last surviving resident from the island of St. Kilda. Antiphon is a term derived from Medieval music in which church choirs sing across each other.... from the Greek.
